Whats Can I Write On A Wedding Card?

MAY 68: THE REVOLT OF THE THEME PARK

was born in the same country and year in which Che Guevara died. I am one who grew up listening to the songs of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones that they placed their parents, and curious to read, and converted into graffiti, those phrases that we let the students of the May 68 uprising in Paris " imagination to power "," forbidden to forbid. " Like many American kids, I spent years of my childhood and adolescence under dictatorial governments. That fueled my nostalgia for the sixties, condensed into the symbolic May.

belong to a generation that had a curious fascination a time that he lived. Perhaps that was why, when I had the opportunity to continue my studies in the United States, decided to apply to Berkeley. Berkeley was an epicenter of the upheaval of the 60's generation, there arose in 1964, the Free Speech Movement, which called for allowing political activities on campus and respect the rights of students to review. It was there also, in 1965, where protests began against the war in Vietnam.

In the early nineties, things had changed in Berkeley. Continued the fervor of the students involved in all causes "progressive", but now everything seemed a parody of the sixties, yes, were the movements for the Tibetan cause and the rights of the Palestinian people, but also could find support for Sendero Luminoso, "heroic advance team" in the fight for " Third World brothers "against capitalism. In 1992 there was a strike by masters and doctoral students we taught classes, we wanted to recognize the right to form a union, for not only students but workers were. We do not teach for two weeks, and did picket lines around the campus throughout the day. Ours did not have the bombast of the causes of the sixties, but we were sure we were asking what is right and we were confident that a progressive university like Berkeley would give us the reason. We were wrong: the president took a hard line, and the movement was disemboweled. We should go back to school for exam week, humiliated, if we did, we would lose our scholarships. Many doctoral students finished leaving college.

Just as flying the flag of the Shining Path did not learn of the naive committed by intellectuals and students May 68 in their struggle against capitalism-its unreserved praise Comrade Mao ", eg - we seemed to have learned that the protests in Berkeley had ended with the defeat of the student movement in 1969, when Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, decided to send the National Guard to deal with students at People's Park. Che had been killed, Russian tanks had entered Czechoslovakia, and in Latin America right forces were preparing to break the power and violent response to the advance of communism and the ideals of the counterculture. There was still some skirmishes triumph of the left (the victory of Allende in Chile), but in general, the seventies were the decade of the reaffirmation of the status quo.

mid-nineties, with the return of democracy, the youth of the middle class and we had adjusted quickly to the neoliberal model. We had reached the conclusion that social change movements were bound to fail, and the utopia of an egalitarian society that was, a utopia. We, therefore, ironic, distant, skeptical. Could have been drawn different conclusions about what happened in the 60's, as it was more worthy dream big and fail than to succeed at the expense of removing any risk. We must not ignore the struggles of the 60-to go beyond the French May, of course, allowed great progress on civil rights, although capitalism was strengthened.

In 2001 I returned to Berkeley as a professor. I found that one of the libraries, the university had opened the café Free Speech Movement. Strange, order a cappuccino at a cafe wallpaper by photos of Mario Savio and other student leaders of the sixties. You could buy postcards and photos of the protests. Once again, the powers that be had taken over the opposition. The sixties are turning into a theme park: it is the way capitalism today incorporates the story to your exhibition catalog.

( Stories , La Tercera, April 27, 2008)

Bread Clips For Wheelchairs

SIX YEARS OF BLACK LABEL

few years ago, I received an email from a Peruvian friend Julio Villanueva Chang, to propose to write an article for the third issue of a magazine called Black Label , which had just launched in Peru. I wrote the text and sent it, days later, I received the answer: July I send the text again, but now with the order of the paragraphs changed and with suggestions for improvement. I lived in the United States and was used to working with publishers minute; my surprise, it was now running into one in Latin America. Excited, I reviewed the text during the night and sent it to July. After a while, I received an email with the news that everything was approved.

In his six years of life, just Black Label has become an essential part of a group of premier cultural journal in Latin America. Black Label Villanueva was born from the meeting between Chang and two entrepreneurs, the brothers Huberth and Gerson Jara. Jara brothers, owners of a small printing shop in a crowded Lima, were interested in publishing a magazine that came into the world of people like them, "entrepreneurs who want more than just making money." Someone told them about July, who had just quit his job as a journalist in Trade and wanted to be a travel reporter (he had written three stories for the magazine Leopard and decided that his was the more than magazine journalism journal .) After a meeting at the coffee Haiti, and that in July the take home to show the room in which he kept, meticulously sorted, all copies of the publications collected ( Esquire, The New Yorker , Vanity Fair ...), they realized that the project was July not with theirs. And yet, had the smell to recognize that the dream of July - "imagine the best magazine in your life" in the words of Toño Angulo Daneri, another of the journalists who embarked on the adventure, had great value, and decided to bet for him.

In order to understand the immensity of what was achieved should be noted that the investment of the brothers Jara was just twenty-five thousand dollars. With that sum, it was to have a staff editorial: there were several contributors, but for the first five numbers the only dedicated right in the magazine was in July. In the midst of snuff and wine, meetings were held in his living room. That craftsmanship, combined with the power of conviction in July, who got first-rate writers, John Lee Anderson, Fernando Savater, Carlos Monsivais, Juan Villoro, did endorse the project and collaborate without receiving anything in return, gave his seal magazine.

formula

Black Label remained unchanged during the first five years: elegant design, thematic unit for each issue (money, sex, food, football, etc), and crónicasextensas of big firms. Such ambition made the early years s Black Label barely survived: the market for this magazine in Peru did not exceed five thousand copies, and no luck at all there were attempts to internationalize. And yet, as noted by Daniel Titinger, new managing editor of the magazine: "Black Label with something very strange happens: the customers began to support us with their ads without the trade magazine. Even, sometimes, we have been at odds with the commercial, doing everything contrary to what a customer would ask. We are not a magazine for housewives, or for men alone, or society, or sports, or lifestyle, we had no fixed niche: and supported us and support us. "

Last year Toño July and left the magazine in the hands of Daniel, who was already working with them. Black Label has been redesigned, with the result that is different, but it is the same. Remain the thematic unity and ambition to publish stories and essays in class, the number of January this year, the last thing I have in my hands, the theme is "Invisible Cities" and there are great stories about Alvaro Bisam apparitions of the Virgin in Valparaiso and Alex Ayala on Vallegrande, the city where Che died - short sections that are added to give read more agility, an unpublished short story (strawberries, Fuguet, Vila-Matas ..., Diego Salazar is the editor of fiction), and the last page belongs to the Argentine cartoonist Liniers.

Black Label is, in turn, journalism and literature. Important names of the current review published in the journal Latin America: Gabriela Wiener, Juan Pablo Meneses, Leila Guerriero, Josefina Licitra. Recent books by chroniclers of the Black Label orbit -Marco Avilés, Juan Manuel Robles, the same Titinger-show conclusively that the magazine has made school. Also walk around books other members of the core of the magazine (Toño Angulo, Sergio Vilela, Daniel Alarcón). The only thing missing is that Black Label can overcome the usual compartments that limit the flow of cultural products of the continent and found in bookstores and newsstands beyond Lima. Meanwhile, at least for the last issues, we have the network .

Minnetonka Moccasin Sales In Minnesota

YELLOW OF FELIX ROMEO

Félix Romeo met ten years ago at a conference organized by the editorial Language of Cloth in the Casa de America in Madrid. I was surprised how warm it was, despite its look of nightclub bouncer. Defending their ideas with passion, and could literally go down into the ring for them: in one of the tables, and did not reach an agreement with someone in the audience, Felix jumped on a table and faced the second is irrelevant . Security guards had to intervene to avoid the blows. In my long career at conferences and book fairs, was the first (and so far only) time I saw a writer willing to go beyond words for an argument.

Felix wrote two novels published by Anagrama and then, although continued to encourage English literary life, stopped publishing books. Last year I announced it would soon publish a text "minor", devoted to remembering a friend who committed suicide when she lived with him in Barcelona, \u200b\u200bfifteen years ago. Now I read that book, Yellow (Plot 2008), discover the modesty of Felix: the book is short, but not lower. Chus Izuel is the friend who committed suicide because of an unrequited love. Chus was a writer and critic with a lot of projection, when showing his bitterness at the love that had left him, Felix, as Bizen (the other friend who lived with them), I thought Chus exaggerating someday wake of that pain and return to normal. But Chus not wake, and Felix had to stay to deal with the ghost of guilt.

Felix did not try to write a biography of Chus. In fact, Felix did not try many things, and that is their salvation and the greatness of this book. The short sentences, laconic tone, speak of the difficult struggle with loss, and how the human being is a mystery. The easy answers are not, and in writing, Felix merely stacking questions. Felix points out, but it's what you do not remember. Felix knows, but it's what do not know. And so, through these silences, writes one of the best eulogies I've read on the death of a friend. On the death of someone. A loss. Several times, while reading the book, I thought Manrique, in Verses for the death of his father .

Queen Bed In A Cargo Van

Piglia WEEK IN MADRID

Piglia Week organized by Latin House (from today until Friday) is a good occasion to renew readings that awakens the work of Argentinian writer. Be critical (Speranza Echevarría, Becerra, Masoliver Rodenas) and writers (Pauls, De Santis, Figueras, Prado, Carrion, Vasquez, Villoro). With the publication of Piglia's place, the anthology of essays on the work of Argentine writer Jorge Carrión has coordinated, you can conclude with confidence: Piglia already belongs to the canon (though, of course, that little word things smell the nineteenth century, to fend literature files, and does not have much to do with today's books Piglia).

tables on the novel will be paranoid about Piglia relationship with film, the story and the comics, and the most important contribution Piglia our literature: the idea that criticism can be made from the fiction. All who have read artificial respiration know that the novel and the essay need not be at odds.

So, we are this afternoon at Casa de America.

Two related articles on Piglia mine: one, because we're on the subject of the novel paranoid, this paragraph from a longer article:

cryptanalyst

Another version can be found in artificial respiration (1980), the novel Ricardo Piglia in which he appeared tangential Arocena, the government censor who reads the letters of suspected opponents in search of the encrypted message ... what is written below, enclosed in letters, such as a speech could be heard only fragments, phrases isolated single words in a language incomprehensible to paritr which had to rebuild the sense. " Cryptanalysis are, Arocena, paranoid readers, people who believe that the texts, images, oversaturated world of secret messages are waiting for their decoders. "Any information seems simple noise until you discover the code," says a character in Neal Stephenson, this magnificent Pynchon for the generation cyberpunk "in his novel Snow Crash . Hoping to break the code, many codebreakers have ended in delirium, losing his mental faculties, in addition to Friedman, the most obvious example is the English Albert Turing, who, to dismantle Enigma - a powerful machine that the Nazis used to encrypt your messages - ended up inventing the prototype of the computer. If Arocena Piglia to recover for a future novel, most likely would be detained in a mental hospital, looking at the white walls of her bedroom secrets of the secret writing. (The full article can be found here ).

Another

a review of The last reader.

Spell To Turn People Into A Dragon

Fogwill

literature eccentric Argentina produces so many writers that eccentricity has become a central part of the literary corpus. If some think of César Aira as the backbone of a type of writing "funny", some think, better, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, known as a dry Fogwill ("I wanted to be at the Socrates and Hegel type. Who says Guillermo Friedrich Hegel. ")

Fogwill has written: "The art of the novel, which seems complex, it appears, when viewed from afar, a simple combinatorial. There is the story, are the chair and the table of novels, and comes in mind to combine some quotes on palabreriles veils. " Everything, well, comes easy. And yet, in Fogwill, which often make is to hide the words "what had to happen behind." One must work for indirection, reading against the grain, find out what is not said behind what is being said. For example, in the history of travel to visit a mother who is About art of the novel, the narrator concludes: "... I had come without documents and did not want to be on the sidewalk or on board the Peugeot, because here is still dangerous to walk down the street without identity papers." This text, written in the early 80's, refers to the period of the dictatorship in Argentina. This dictatorship is here, what is not narrated but at the same time, thanks to the "art of the novel, is very present.

Fogwill has written the great novel about the war in the Falklands ( analyzed texts), and better than anyone has told the imbalances of the neoliberal Argentina ( Sense experience). It has also been one of the writers who have been Borges face and emerge unscathed, in Help him, a short novel re-imagines the Beatriz Viterbo "El Aleph", but key sexualized and hallucination drugs. If these elements do not appear Borges of "sensory experience," sex, drugs, Fogwill dares to help fill the gaps ( Help it can be read as Help Borges). In fact, all the work of Fogwill can be understood as an attempt to fill the gaps: Fogwill has suggested that the current use of language produces "artifacts prefabricated" platitudes that are "empty", the writer should go against the artifice against the common place, and fill that void.

Making Bamboo Charcoal

ASTRO BOY

I wanted to show Gabriel (my oldest son, seven years) something I saw during my early adolescence, and downloaded the fifty-one episodes of Astro Boy . In the end, I turned to engage, I had forgotten Tezuka humor, and did not know that the adventures of robot child in the fight against Atlas had much to tell an adult. Astro Boy was created as a manga in 1952, reappeared as a series of white television black and during the sixties, and was redesigned by Tezuka in the eighties, in color. They say the black and white version is the best, I saw the eighties. The drawings are rather primitive, the characters sketchy, but Tezuka's vision of a world where robots coexist with human beings is full of nuances and allusions that make it increasingly topical.

24' X 24' House Plans

KAFKA AND PRAGUE

As Prague has not changed is the insistent manner in which claims to Kafka as an essential part of the city. Perhaps no city so marked by the imprint of Prague a writer, despite the fact that Kafka did not acclimated nothing specifically in Prague (although, of course, many of their descriptions have to Prague as a starting point.) Curious paradox, a place where your child just might post more important in life, he repressed his books in the decades of communism frost, and now sells them on postcards, T-shirts, posters, pins . What would you say about the man who wrote as little about the alienation of modern life?

any kiosk in the city can get a map of the Prague of Kafka. The truth, however, is that as there is no street, avenue, or neighborhood that does not refer to any way to the Czech writer, one can get to walk around town without a map and just one will run into a Kafkaesque historic landmark. I came by accident to the Tower Street in the Plaza Franz Kafka, number 5 / 27, where the writer was born in 1883.

on map can be selected certain places: the Street of the Alchemists, number 22 in the realms of Hradcany Castle, where Kafka wrote some of his most important stories (including "The Great Wall of China"); Na Poricz 7 / 1075, where he was the insurance company where he worked Kafka Chotek Park, a favorite of the writer; Male namesti 2 / 3, where Kafka lived during his childhood and where heading out to school; Pariszka 36/883, where Kafka lived in his youth and wrote "The Metamorphosis" Bilkova 10/868, where he wrote The process; Skorepa 1 / 27, house where he lived Max Brod and Kafka met Felice Bauer Strasnice cemetery where Kafka's grave. And of course, Kafka renovated museum, which is reached by crossing the bridge of San Carlos, towards Hradcany. Today there is mounted a sophisticated and cutting-edge facility that represents in detail the labyrinthine world, bureaucratic, prison, the writer died of tuberculosis in 1924.

Vodickova On the street, number 44, was the cabaret Lucerne, which Kafka used to go with Max Brod and other artists. In the early twentieth century, had come to Prague this new type of entertainment called "cabaret", the Lucerne offered performances of Czech and foreign artists of the moment. Degradation signs everywhere: what we now term "cabaret" in Prague is not what was meant in times of Kafka. What would the Czech writer to have the opportunity to see places like Darling or Atlas? Surely there would be no moral judgments here but yes, perhaps a great opportunity to turn a facet prosaic modern life in a great parable about the human condition.

Measurements To Build A Canoe

PRAGUE SEX CAPITAL

Nearby Phoenix, where I was staying, a few blocks from Wenceslas Square - were two cabarets: the Atlas and Darling. Every time I passed through the door, received pamphlets and offers. In my previous visit to Prague remembered nothing to submit to sex today, however, do not toil much in finding the marks of the city as capital of sex in Europe are in all the streets and avenues. There are "erotic supermarket" offering from recent successes of local porn to various combination of latex and cuerto, and no neighborhood that does not have the glittering neon lights typical of cabarets.

all starts with porn, from a couple of years Prague has become the European capital of porn, bypassing Budapest. To this can be several reasons: liberal laws for shooting pornographic films, low costs and a huge number of women into the mold established by industry (white-skinned blonde, ready to any kind of sexual experience). The films of European and American porn stars have several Czech, perhaps the best known is Silvia Saint.

The sex industry operates at full speed in Prague, and its relatively affordable prices for Europe, has become a central square of sex tourism: the Germans and the British make their own here. There are three forms of sexual solicitation: online, in private apartments ("privats") and cabarets. The Internet specializes in companions or "escorts" are listings where you can find more than nine hundred girls, with names like Marketa, Petra and Dana, and a description of its main features: their actions, if they speak English or German if they are willing or able to do this or that.

There are girls who work independently, but the vast majority belong to one agency "escorts." There are agencies that specialize in VIP models and porn stars and offer prices at the height of the main European capitals (three hundred euros for two hours), but the majority are students who do nothing but be "escorts" and their prices range between sixty and one hundred euros per hour, with many restrictions: there is no mouth kissing, fondling can not reach the sinuses, oral sex only with condoms, etc. As this is a business, anything that goes beyond basic sex can be achieved, but for this you have to pay (forty euros extra to kissing on the mouth, etc).

As for the "privats" and cabarets scattered throughout the city, they belong to a few entrepreneurs. When I visited the Darling, I found it rather than cabaret, a brothel, in the menu next to the price list of beers and drinks, was the price list of sexual encounters, they could go from twenty minutes to overnight. Total absence of rhetoric: the girls who approached me-Czech, Russian, Romanian, Moldovan, Slovakian, went straight to the point and asked if I wanted twenty minutes of sex. When I I was not interested, I was offered the opportunity to attend a private show among lesbians. Upon leaving, one of the bouncers came up to me to offer a card that would allow me free access to the Go-Go's, half a block. The Go-Go's belonged to the owner, who was not willing to lose customers and offered, in a display of inventiveness, the ability to go to another brothel, but in which charged half of what it charged the former.

(supplement Travel, La Tercera, April 4, 2008)

What Kind Of Hair Do Lala Wear

CHRONICLE OF A JOURNEY TO PRAGUE (I)

a decade and a half ago, when the euro did not exist and travel by train through Europe was a kind of rite of passage for students in American universities, I bought a Eurailpass and undertook a two-month vaje started in Amsterdam and ended in London. Over time, European cities and the experiences of those days, the Expo in Seville, the Barcelona Olympics were melting and intermingling, but there was a town that maintained its originality: Prague. There was something grim fairy tale in that city with Hradcany Castle presidential trimmed at the bottom of the landscape and the houses of heraldic facades with towers pointing heavenward.

That's why I decided to return to Prague. It was traveling to the past with the hope that it remains intact, albeit accompanied by the inevitable and disturbing feeling that, as part of the European Community, the capital of the Czech Republic would have undoubtedly lost much of its originality. What would remain of the large spectral Prague Franz Kafka considered his "prison" and that in which Gustav Meyrink had the atmosphere of the Golem, that being that "sometimes roams the streets to spread horror among the people"?

Prague has been modernized, but not enough to lose their romance. The city on the banks of Moldova has new bridges that cross it, though it has left untouched, as a tourist attraction, the stone bridge of San Carlos, where one can find sellers of typical Prague pictures, reproductions of Mucha - that great art nouveau artist -and trinkets, tourists crowd in front of the portrait artists offering to draw your portrait for a few crowns. In December, in the booths of the main square, and those found around the pedestrian streets of Mala Strana, vendors offer Christmas births, necklaces and earrings and bracelets with Bohemian crystal Matrioshkas Russian puppets and puppets everywhere, and are also the Czech food stalls, which does not differ much for its originality as it is a mix of the cuisines of neighboring countries, local specialties here are the German sausage with sauerkraut and Hungarian goulash. Eating strong, very greasy, with little sophistication. The only truly Czech is roast duck.

Starbucks has not yet come to Prague, but several chains of Italian coffee (Lavazza, Illy). As for fast food, the Czechs seem to have a penchant for Kentucky Chicken (is everywhere, and she's always full). Abound exchange houses and bars irlandeses, que ofrecen sin descanso partidos de fútbol de todas las ligas (y en los que hay cerveza de todas partes del mundo y posters con conocidas beldades checas: Petra Nemcova, Eva Herzigova).